


What Keeps You Reading or Watching?

by yourlibrarian



Series: Reading Fan Vids [4]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Fanfiction, Fanvids, Gen, Meta, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 09:48:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6748840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I was interested in puzzling out ways in which there might be a common language for vids and fics, and which of their elements could be compared.  It seemed to me that both have some common things that will make people pay attention or turn them away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Keeps You Reading or Watching?

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted August 23, 2005

I was interested in puzzling out ways in which there might be a common language for vids and fics, and which of their elements could be compared. It seemed to me that both have some common things that will make people pay attention or turn them away.

For example, the technical basics. In the same way that many people will stop reading a fic riddled with misspellings, major grammatical errors, and a lack of punctuation, most probably won't watch videos with sloppy edits, long scenes with no edits, or whose poor visual quality is distracting.

On the other hand, some things seem impossible to control -- for example, the matter of musical choice. The music itself may be perfectly integrated with the visuals but if I don’t like the song I’m going to have a hard time liking the vid. Can a vid’s visual elements be compelling enough to overcome a musical taste disconnect? Would watching it repeatedly make me like the song better if I liked the visuals? Given that I watched MTV when it was still about playing videos, I’m going to say it depends on how much I dislike it. Visuals could make me like a song better, but they couldn’t make me like a song I hated. On the other hand, liking the music couldn’t make me watch a video I found boring either. Of course if you're using video to market music then it doesn't matter, as long as either the visual or audio gets the song into rotation. You're doubling your chances with the visuals. However fan vids work on the opposite principle -- the music is supposed to help sell the visuals.

I guess another issue is investment. Does the vid or fic have enough going for it to make you keep reading/watching? How much is enough? With fic, lots of people will read stuff they’re struggling with just to have a kink payoff. Is there a parallel to this in a video? I’m thinking that the song will do that more than the visuals. More than once I decided I didn’t really want to keep a video I downloaded but I really liked the song a lot and I kept that instead. On the other hand if I downloaded a video because I already liked the song? It didn’t make me keep the video around unless I liked the whole vid. First, I’ve seen all the clips before at some point. Second, I may have seen the clips in a lot of other videos. Unless something fairly different was done with it, it didn’t have that much staying power. So is music itself a type of vid kink or are there others?

Since musical choice is not something either author or audience has much control over when it comes to taste matching, I think it may come closest to the issue of character interpretation in fanfic. For example, a fic writer would have a fair amount of control over dialogue, action, writing style, storyline and genre. But character interpretation? That seems to be a highly personal point of connection to canon for both author and audience. I think one could argue that there are distinct schools of thought when it comes to a given character. But even people who, say, interpret Xander as a perpetual loser who is terribly underappreciated by the other Scoobies, probably do so to different degrees. And they want to write about him exactly because they relate to him in a certain way. That’s who he is to them. I do think people can be swayed to broaden or shift their interpretations by discussion or reading other people’s fic, but I don’t know if people who already hold strong opinions on a character would change that. Now, I know a lot of people have begun to like or dislike a character based on something that happened _in canon_ (Connor and Buffy spring to mind). But given that the Buffyverse canon is, at least for the time being, closed, I’m thinking that readers' strong opinions wouldn’t change that much. No one is ever going to induce a love of heavy metal music in me. I may find certain songs mildly tolerable, but in general? No. And I know I just won’t read fic that positions characters in a way that's really far off from how I interpret them either.

The most intriguing works are probably those that don't line up perfectly with my interests but have some aspect of them that's so well done or thought provoking that I keep reading or watching anyway, because it makes me focus on just what it is that keeps me following it.


End file.
